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Jesus Plays Basketball,
And Yes, 'He Got Game'

By

Joe Morgenstern

Updated April 30, 1998 11:59 p.m. ET

Spike Lee sets his own rules in "He Got Game" and comes up a winner. It's his best film so far, a funny, nervy, poundingly powerful morality play about big-time basketball; imagine "Hoop Dreams" as a religious comic book. (The ecstatic cinematography is by Malik Hassan Sayeed.) Mr. Lee is no stranger to moralizing. All his films contain didactic threads, which sometimes unravel in the absence of dramatic clarity. Not this time, though. The writer-director tells his tale of temptation, corruption and redemption through two lives hanging perilously in the balance: Jesus Shuttlesworth, a young player with...